March 14, 2018

We are pleased to announce the addition of a new full-text searching tool for 9CHRIS, which permits searching within 9CHRIS documents on a page-by-page basis. This addition functions much like a traditional search engine, making it straightforward to find even relatively obscure names or phrases in the text of individual briefs and transcripts.

Full-text searching is available here: http://search.9chris.org

Search hits will show a snippet of the matching text in its surrounding context, with links to the document on 9CHRIS (to see more information about the document as a whole), as well as a link directly to the matching page in the volume file at the Internet Archive. Additional information about the database and its features can be found on the help page.

The full-text search site supplements rather than supplants the search function of the original 9CHRIS site, which gives researchers two different ways to get at the data. For general inquiries, looking for a more general concept (such as "mining"), searching the original site is probably most productive, due to the presence of document-level keywords and keyphrases. For very specific queries (such as "centrifugal pump" or the name of a specific person, place, or ship), the full-text search is likely the best place to begin.

The search engine is beta software, so features and interfaces may change. Bug reports are appreciated. Additionally, links between individual pages and their corresponding 9CHRIS document, as well as other information about the documents, are gradually being corrected and added.

Please contact eric@9chris.org with any questions, suggestions for fixes or improvements, or queries about manipulating the data. Happy searching!